The Biggest Jobs Report Conspiracy Just Got Destroyed

Brett LoGiurato, provided by

Published 8:21 am, Friday, May 2, 2014

The U.S. Commerce Department's Office of the Inspector General released a report on Thursday finding no evidence to support allegations the monthly employment data was manipulated in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

The allegations first came to light last November after the New York Post published a story purporting that the Census Bureau employees conducting the household survey — which determines the unemployment rate — were pressured by higher-ups to fudge surveys and fill in data gaps when they could not get adequate response rates.

But the independent investigation, launched after the Post's story, found no evidence to support the allegations. The Office of the Inspector General said in its report that it "exhaustively investigated these allegations and found them to be unsubstantiated.

"However, during our review, we identified several areas where the Census Bureau could implement policies and improve processes to better prevent survey data falsification," the report said.

It also said it is theoretically possible, though highly unlikely, that Census Bureau employees could conspire to reduce the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points in a single month.

On average, according to the report, a single field representative surveys about 30 respondents each month to determine their employment status. Since the unemployment rate at the time was 8.1%, roughly 2.4 out of those 30 were unemployed.

That means, to change the unemployment rate by just 0.1%, a group of field representatives would need to change 63 people from unemployed to employed. It would take 27 field representatives changing all of their unemployed to employed to accomplish this, meaning the 27 field representatives would have a perfect rate of employed.

The Office of the Inspector General determined it would take a more widespread effort to complete the 0.3% manipulation in a single month. According to the report, about 78 field representatives would have had to participate in the scheme.

The report did find evidence of falsification from the Philadelphia office, but it was "not atypical." Of the approximately 1,200 field representatives working out of the Philadelphia region, a Census Bureau process determined that 14 falsified data. This would not be enough, however, to substantially affect the survey.

"To further reduce the risk for survey data falsification, supervisors should scrutinize workloads and staffing levels to avoid assigning atypically large workloads to field representatives," the office concluded.